Troubleshooting the White Screen of Death (WSoD)

The "White Screen of Death" (WSoD) is a notorious issue, particularly common in PHP-based applications like WordPress. It manifests as a completely blank white screen in the browser with no error messages.

What It Means

A WSoD typically indicates a critical PHP error or a database error that prevents the page from rendering any content. Because error reporting might be turned off on the server, you see a blank screen instead of a helpful message.

Common Causes

• Plugin Conflict: A poorly coded or incompatible plugin.
• Theme Conflict: A faulty theme can cause fatal errors.
• PHP Memory Limit Exhausted: A script requires more memory than allocated.

How to Fix (If You Own the Website)

• Enable Debugging Mode: In WordPress, change define( 'WP_DEBUG', false ); to true in your wp-config.php to log errors.
• Increase PHP Memory Limit: Try adding define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); via wp-config.php.
• Disable All Plugins: Rename the plugins folder via FTP to test if a plugin is the culprit.